Saturday, June 17, 2017

New Zealand's accountability deficit

(First published in The Dominion Post, June 16.)

When did you last hear of a judge resigning because honour
demanded it, or to atone for a catastrophic error?

The most recent example I can think of is former District
Court judge Robert Hesketh, who did the honourable thing by quitting in 1997
after pleading guilty to charges arising from fraudulent expense claims.

His fellow judge Martin Beattie faced similar charges but
chose to fight them and was acquitted.

Beattie claimed $10,000 worth of expenses for hotel
accommodation when in fact he had stayed in his own home. A jury appeared to
accept Beattie’s defence that he thought he was entitled to claim the expenses
and had never been told otherwise.

I believe the court of public opinion reached its own
verdict, and it wasn’t the one the jury arrived at.

Beattie subsequently paid the money back, which seemed an
acknowledgement that he wasn’t entitled to it in the first place, but he
refused to resign despite being asked to do so by then Justice Minister Doug
Graham.

He was subsequently moved from frontline court duties, taking
up an appointment as the Accident Compensation Appeal Authority. But he
retained his status, and presumably his judge’s salary too.

Move on now to 2011 and the tragic murder of Christie
Marceau. All murders are tragic but this one especially so, because it was
committed by a man who was out on bail when clearly he represented a threat to
the 18-year-old North Shore woman.

The police knew Christie was at risk from Akshay Chand and so,
apparently, did Judge Barbara Morris, who had twice ruled that he should be kept behind bars for an earlier attack on her.

But then Chand came before Judge David McNaughton. He wrote
a letter to the judge saying he was remorseful and wanted to apologise. He
later told police that his sole purpose in writing the letter was to get bail
so he could murder Marcie.

The ruse worked. The judge bailed Chand to live in a house
just 300 metres from his intended victim – this, despite Christie’s own plea that
he be kept behind bars.

Thirty-two days later Christie was dead – stabbed repeatedly
in a frenzied attack by Chand, who was subsequently found not guilty on the
grounds of insanity.

Clearly, judges are human and prone to error. We can't expect them to have the wisdom of Solomon. But some
mistakes have such profoundly catastrophic consequences that the public is
entitled to expect an act of atonement.

In the Christie Marceau case, a contributory factor was the
apparent failure to include on Chand’s court file a record of Judge Morris’s
earlier decisions to refuse bail and her cautionary comments about Chand’s
mental state. Even so, there was ample evidence to justify him being kept in
custody.

Once the enormity of Judge McNaughton’s mistake became
obvious, it would have been fitting for him to step down. Some of us might
wonder how he managed to sleep at night, let alone continue to sit on the
Bench. But he did.

If it’s true that Judge Morris’s notes were never included
on Chand’s court file, I also wonder whether the clerk responsible for the
oversight ever faced any consequences – which brings me to the point of this
column.

From top to bottom, New Zealand seems to suffer from an
accountability deficit – a stubborn unwillingness by people in positions of
public responsibility to fall on their swords when they are found to have behaved
either badly or incompetently.

We’ve been reminded of McNaughton’s terrible mistake this
week because an inquest is finally being conducted into Christie Marceau’s
death. But there have been plenty of other examples.

In this column several weeks ago I referred to the e-coli
outbreak caused by contaminated tap water in Havelock North. No heads rolled,
despite 5000 people getting sick.

Pike River? The same. The collapse of the CTV building in
Christchurch? Ditto.

The builders of leaky homes have largely escaped punishment
and no one seems to carry the can when supposedly state-of-the-art,
earthquake-resistant buildings are rendered uninhabitable while much older
buildings are undamaged.

Only this week it was revealed that the Ministry of Social
Development spent nearly $300,000 of our money in legal costs on what was
clearly a butt-covering exercise after a woman killed herself following an
accusation of benefit fraud which was found to be unsubstantiated.

One thing we do very well in this country, besides rugby, is evasion of responsibility. We get reports and inquiries, hollow apologies and hand-wringing ... and then it's back to business as usual.

Lest we forget: Blessie Gottingco murdered by a man whom (for want of a better word) Justice Keane released on bail despite pleas not to do so from police and prosecuting counsel. Mr Keane still goes home of an evening to enjoy his dinner, to sleep uninterrupted in a comfortable bed, revelling no doubt in his large salary - with generous superannuation to follow - and protected by a grossly imbalanced system of (un)accountability amongst NZ's judiciary.

About Me

I am a freelance journalist and columnist living in the Wairarapa region of New Zealand. In the presence of Greenies I like to boast that I walk to work each day - I've paced it out and it's about 15 metres. I write about all sorts of stuff: politics, the media, music, wine, films, cycling and anything else that piques my interest - even sport, though I admit I don't have the intuitive understanding of sport that most New Zealand males absorb as if by osmosis. I'm a former musician (bass and guitar) with a lifelong love of music that led me to write my book 'A Road Tour of American Song Titles: From Mendocino to Memphis', published by Bateman NZ in July 2016. I've been in journalism for more than 40 years and like many journalists I know a little bit about a lot of things and probably not enough about anything. I have never won any journalism awards.